The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention and its application and users, but may not constitute prior art.
As the world economy grows and international tourism rapidly expands, there has been a recent explosion in the celebrity tour business where many tours take celebrity seekers to visit residences owned and hotspots frequented by celebrities past and present. Celebrity-oriented van and bus tours trade on the ever-growing interests in the private lives of celebrities and the fantasies of serendipitous celebrity encounters. In places like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and New York City, visitors pay a hefty fee for roofless bus tours that last for only an hour or two, gawking at the luxuriousness of celebrity estates and trying to catch stars living or working in their natural surroundings.
On a typical celebrity bus tour, livery drivers often serve as the voice tour guides as well, blasting news, stories, anecdotes, and gossips over a loud speaker or individual headphones, building and delivering the impression that celebrities are just around the corner. One issue with such bus tours is the lack of quality control on the content of the tour. There is no guarantee that residences or other sighting locations featured on a tour are ever associated with a celebrity, and false advertisements are rarely investigated. Also, unless regular news updates are provided to tour guides, information they deliver becomes unreliable over time. In addition, for group bus tours, visitors are not able to pick or choose which celebrity locations to visit. Instead, they are forced into inflexible tour durations at the tour operator's itinerary, often unable to stay at any particular location of interest for enough time to capture a good photograph or to look up the address or history of the place they have just visited.
An alternative to celebrity bus tours is to purchase a “celebrity star map,” a physical map that contains a list of hundreds of celebrity names and associated residences and hotspot locations. While star maps allow visitors to tour at their own paces, such maps are not always geographically accurate, and addresses often become obsolete, as real estate properties frequently change hands among the wealthy. Moreover, for those who want to visit sighting locations where celebrities have been spotted and hotspots where celebrities frequent, a physical map that has not been recently updated becomes useless when the celebrity of interest moves. More importantly, navigating with a physical map filled with hundreds of names may not be as obvious as one might expect. Confusion can easily arise for those lacking navigational skills. With a large number of celebrities listed in very small font, visitors may further have a hard time determining which locations to navigate to and how to optimize the tour, under their own constraints on time and transportation modes. Lastly, many times even when visitors successfully find a celebrity residence, they may come to see poor views blocked by privacy shrubbery or gates with long driveways.
While paper maps including paper celebrity maps are still popular for their portability and general reliability, digital maps have boomed over the past decade with the advent of ever more accurate positioning systems and the availability of mobile devices. Dedicated vehicle GPS devices, and mapping applications on mobile devices are almost ubiquitous nowadays. Nonetheless, in the field of celebrity tours, no integrated mapping system exists to provide customized, self-guided tours, to allow users to read corresponding celebrity biographies and news, to browse celebrity real estate and hotspot profiles, or to receive live celebrity sighting updates. Likewise, while social networking and media websites such as Twitter are widely available for users to search for celebrity sighting information within their proximity, such passive searches do not, in any sense, maximize the users' probability of sighting the celebrity themselves. For those who wait for hours just to get a glimpse of Justin Bieber, knowing that they have just missed the pop idol from one block away could be devastating news.
Therefore, in view of the aforementioned difficulties, there is an unsolved need to provide to celebrity seekers, self-guided yet fully customized and curated celebrity tours, with periodic or live updates to ensure associated celebrity information, including sighting information, is accurate and up to date.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.